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This reminds me of the German custom. You can seemingly drop by for coffee (including cake, of course) at any reasonable time, but while you may be offered dinner it would be very unusual and weird to accept unless it was effectively a pre-planned dinner party or event.
The British seem to mean it more honestly, they’ll say something like “I’m just making pasta for dinner tonight, please stay” and welcome it. But the inverse is that if you’re ever outside the home and they invite you over, there’s a 95% chance they’re just being polite (the famous “oh, we must do dinner”) and would be horrified at you actually expecting a date and time.
Anglos aren’t desperate to feed you but they’re usually happy enough to have the company. Kind of a hybrid between the Scandinavians and, say, Indians or Mexicans who start serving food and don’t stop.
My wife used to spend a fair bit of time in the UK for work and she had dinner at home with multiple colleagues, at different occasions, with their families. I've always wondered a bit whether they were just very inviting to their Swedish boss or if she accepted insincere invitations. She thought it was nice but also a bit strange, and the same thing didn't happen with her French or German coworkers, they just ate out.
I've certainly never been invited to have dinner with a colleague and their family in their home.
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Maybe it’s just the quality of the food. In my experience, the french are more sparing with their dinner invitations than the germans – understandable, when they feel obliged to offer multiple courses of heavenly delights, while the german casually serves you his dreadful slop, ‘come as you are and eat what is left’.
Our dreadful slop is filling and gives you energy for actual work. Not like the eternal slimming diet the french are on. Their food is art, but art sucks, and ours is meant to get people through a long day of actual work, which it does.
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German cooks are often good when they cook you the food of their people, but they have an awful fondness for the most awful bastardizations of “Asian food” imaginable. The English, meanwhile, are usually either good cooks at multiple cuisines or terrible at all of them, including their own.
Germans just don’t care about food like the french do. Even working class french people spend considerable money and time preparing different kinds of meat, on any given day of the week. Middle class germans eat potato salad with sausage on christmas. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll spring for some schweinemedaillons – but whatever happens, it’s all pork all the time. I don’t really mind, I enjoy the lack of fuss. I find the french high maintenance, generally. At work, at school, at dinner, germans are more laid back.
Really? I thought the tradition was fish on Christmas Eve - in the far south they had the (amusingly Jewish to my mind, although of course not really) smoked salmon with latkes (kartoffelpuffer), and then goose on Christmas Day. Pork was reserved for breakfast or the 26th.
Truth is that almost every family has their own traditions here. Ours was grilled chicken.
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